The Two Front War: Jews, Identity, Liberalism, and Voting*

Transcription

1 The Two Front War: Jews, Identity, Liberalism, and Voting* Eric M. Uslaner Department of Government and Politics University of Maryland College Park College Park, MD Mark Lichbach Department of Government and Politics University of Maryland College Park College Park, MD

2 ABSTRACT The Two Front War: Jews, Identity, Liberalism, and Voting American Jews are more Democratic and more liberal than non-jews. We compare American Jewish voting behavior and liberalism to non-jews in 2004 using a survey of Jews from the National Jewish Democratic Coalition and the American National Election Study. Jews and non-jews base their votes on previous votes, direction of the country, and party identification. Positions on Israel pushed many Jews to the Republicans, but attitudes toward evangelicals led others back to the Democrats. For non-jews, attitudes toward evangelicals are closely linked to a larger culture war, but for Jews this correlation is small. The Jewish reaction to evangelicals is more of an issue of identity and the close ties of evangelicals to the Republican party keeps many Jews Democratic. Attitudes toward fundamentalists are far more important to Jewish voting behavior than for non-jewish voters.

3 American Jews have always lived dual lives. They rapidly assimilated and became ordinary Americans. Yet, they have also remained a people apart (Katznelson, 1995). Based upon a long history of discrimination, they band together in strong community institutions and they identify with other groups, such as African-Americans and gays, that continue to face discrimination (Fuchs, 1956, 175) even as they are the most successful and visible group of outsiders in American life. The Jewish voter is very much like the Jewish citizen. On the one hand, (s)he is like every other voter, casting ballots based upon party identification, ideology, and the state of the economy (Sigelman, 1991). On the other hand, Jews are distinctive in their political views. Jews, like other minority groups, became part of the Democratic coalition established in the 1930s with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Over the next 70 years, other groups (especially Catholics) drifted away from the Democratic coalition, while Jews and African- Americans remained loyal (Stanley and Niemi, 2005). Why are Jews and blacks still so loyal to the Democratic party when other parts of the New Deal coalition have, to varying degrees, defected? African-American loyalty to the Democrats is partially explicable by demographics. Working class people are more likely to vote Democratic (Bartels, 2005) and African-Americans are more likely to identify themselves as working class than middle or upper class. Jews saw themselves at the higher end of the class 1 structure. So we might expect that Jews would vote Republican while African-Americans would remain loyal to the Democrats. 1

4 This view is incomplete for two key reasons. First, at least in 2004, the link between 2 social class and Democratic voting seems to have weakened. Second and more critically, African-Americans and Jews have common reasons for remaining loyal to the Democrats. Both are liberal and see themselves as minorities facing threats from others in the society. A perception of threat from politically powerful groups in a society leads minority group members to solidify their own political allegiance especially when one party (the Democrats) has a longstanding reputation as the defender of minorities. Many African-Americans see a threat from whites in general (Dawson, 1994, ch. 4); Jews have traditionally worried about anti-semitism, but in contemporary politics, they perceive threat from a group that sees itself as philo-semitic, evangelical Protestants. The dislike of, indeed perhaps fear of, evangelical strength in politics and society is a central factor in keeping Jews attached to the Democratic party, the party that has traditionally been the political haven of minorities. Social identity theory and more recent literature on racial prejudice, help to explain the Jewish attachment to the Democratic party, above and beyond ideological attachment. Jews vote Democratic and identify as liberals even though their economic self-interest as one of the wealthiest ethnic groups in the United States should make them conservative Republicans. The most common explanation in the literature for why Jews still vote Democratic stems from greater liberalism, as represented by support for social issues such as gay rights, abortion, gun control, and programs to end poverty. In turn, this commitment to progressive causes reflects a history of discrimination leading to identification with other victims, continuing feelings of vulnerability, the Jewish commandment to heal the world, the strong community ties that 2

5 reinforce these values and lead to social action, and the historical identification of Jews with socialist causes in Europe (Legge, 1995; Levey, 1996; Weisberg and Sylvan, 2003). The commitment to a progressive agenda, especially one based upon social issues, puts Jews at one end of the culture wars in American politics. Christian fundamentalists are at the other pole (Layman and Green, in press), so the wariness of Jews about the Christian right is understandable on policy grounds alone. Attitudes toward fundamentalists have become linked with positions on issues such as gay rights, abortion policy, and feminism for the larger electorate since the 1980s and the connections have become increasingly tight since then (Bolce and DiMaio, 1999; Miller, Wlezien, and Hildreth, 1991, ). Non-Jews rate evangelicals positively on balance and those who have negative views are overwhelmingly on the left on social issues. Jews may be more liberal than other Americans, especially on social policy. Yet, the culture war thesis is not sufficient to account for why Jews are more loyalty to the Democratic party than other groups. Jews are far more united in their negative evaluations of evangelicals than are non-jews and this wariness toward fundamentalists is only weakly linked to attitudes on social issues. Jewish concern for the rights of groups that have faced discrimination is distinct from Jewish concern about their own political and social fate in contemporary American politics. The social liberalism of American Jews is rooted in the long history of discrimination against Jews throughout the world. The fear of evangelicals is based not on worries about whether Jews will achieve material success. Most American Jews take such success for granted. Nor is it based upon a social conscience. Instead, it reflects the persistence of Jewish 3

6 identification as outsiders as someone whose culture and traditions, if not material success, may be under threat. Jews do not fear pogroms, as in Russia or Nazi Germany. But, as the American Jewish population has declined and more Jews turn away from their faith, those who still hold to their tradition worry about social and political forces that might induce others to convert. This fear of evangelicals, with their message that Jews must accept Jesus Christ to enter heaven, is more based upon self-interest than social justice. We shall argue that this concern over the importance of fundamentalists in American politics generally and in the Republican party more specifically leads to Jewish solidarity with the Democratic party above and beyond the issue disagreements with the Christian right on social issues. The rising influence of fundamentalists within the Republican party is a key factor in both why Jews voted Democratic in 2004 and why some Jews who strayed from this path in 2000 returned to the fold four years later. The evangelical threat to Jewish identity leads to greater group cohesion, social identity theory and literature on racial discrimination tells us. Jews respond to many of the same social forces as African-Americans, where a sense of shared fate with other blacks leads to greater issue accord and continued attachment to the Democratic party (Dawson, 1994). In 2004, as in some previous elections, there was a countervailing force pushing a small number of Jews to the Republican party: support for Israel and the related concern for terrorism. The Republicans had worked hard to paint themselves as stronger supporters of Israel than the Democrats and President George W. Bush trumpeted his role as a strong leader in the fight against terrorism after the attacks on September 11, Both issues resonated with some Jews in 2004, but hardly enough to move the overall distribution of the Jewish vote. 4

7 Since many fundamentalist leaders have been vocal supporters of Israel, we might expect that support for Israel and ratings of evangelicals would complement each other, rather than work in opposite directions. For a small share of Jewish voters, they do, but we shall see that there is little connection between evaluation of evangelicals and the importance of Israel as a voting cue, similar to the lack of connection with social issues. Even Jews who are the strongest supporters of Israel are skeptical about evangelicals. We support these claims through an analysis of 2004 vote expectations in the Jewish and non-jewish populations in the United States, as well as the linkages between several of our measures and vote change from 2000 to For Jews, we analyze a survey conducted by Greenberg Research for the National Jewish Democratic Coalition (NJDC) in the summer of This is an Internet survey of 817 likely Jewish voters conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research in Washington, D.C.. While there may be some concern about online surveys, they are becoming more common in survey research and the analysts who conducted the survey 3 at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner assured us that their sample is representative of American Jews. We use the 2004 American National Election Study to compare, to the extent possible, these findings with non-jewish voting behavior for all non-jews and for non-jews excluding Christian evangelicals. We conduct a separate analysis of non-evangelicals to get a better understanding of how feelings about evangelicals shape the voting behavior of Jews and non- Jews. We find, following Sigelman (1991), that the traditional forces of party identification and the belief that the country is heading in the right direction matter for Jews as they do for non- Jews and white ethnics. 5

8 On these traditional variables shaping vote choice, Jews stand out as distinctive: They are more Democratic, less likely to see the country heading in the right direction under a Republican President, and less conservative. Yet, the impacts of vote choice are generally similar for both Jews and non-jews. Attitudes on social issues shape the voting behavior of both Jews and non- Jews; even though the measures in the two surveys are different, it seems that attitudes on gun control important for both Jews and non-jews, gay marriage does not shape vote choice (except for evangelicals) and abortion is critical only for non-jews. Overall, however, the basic contours of vote choice are remarkably similar for Jews and non-jews except for positions on Israel and for evaluations of evangelicals (fundamentalists). Both of these factors matter only for Jews. Why Identity Matters Why should attitudes toward evangelicals affect Jewish voting behavior? Social identity theory and theories of racial prejudice help us understand why Jewish feelings about fundamentalist Christians matter for vote choice. A group norm develops when people see their identity as shaped by contrasts with others; especially when people see a common threat to their group from others, this norm will involve active opposition to the other group (Brewer, 1999, 436; Turner et al., 1987, 203). Perceived conflict between two groups enhances the cohesion of the each group (Tajfel, 1982, 15). So there is pressure to conform to the group threat even if individual members do not feel at risk (Bobo and Hutchings, 1996, ). Concerns about threat from out-groups is particularly strong for minority groups (Brewer, 1979, 316). 6

9 Conover (1988, 65) argues that groups define themselves politically on issues that are at the core of their identities. Outgroups often form the focal point of group thinking about politics; when the in-group (Jews) believe that the outgroup threatens (or is negatively interdependent with the in-group) its long-term fate, the outgroup may become a critical element in the in-group schema. This conceptual scheme is derived from social identity theory (Tajfel, 1982; Turner et al., 1987, among others) and revisionist work on racial prejudice. Blumer (1958, 5) characterized the roots of prejudice as a felt challenge to [a] sense of group position. It is the foundation of how minorities, especially African-Americans, perceive their social status (Bobo and Hutchings, 1996) and their political world. Dawson (1987, chs. 4 and 6) traces African-American liberalism (and through ideology, attachment to the Democratic party) to a sense of shared fate with other blacks in contrast to a weaker sense of group identity. Blacks who see a common destiny with other African-Americans are more likely to define their political interests in terms of race (Dawson, 1987, ch. 5). For many years and across countries, Jewish political preferences have been shaped by perceptions of threat from other groups (Medding, 1977). In the United States today, Jews see Christian fundamentalists as posing a threat to their future as a religious minority. They see political life through the prism of the Christian right far more than will other groups. Even though individual Jews may not feel threatened by evangelicals, the perceived threat to Jewish identity leads to sharp reactions against evangelicals above and beyond the disagreements on issues underlying the culture war. The history of anti-semitism that led many Jews to flee to the United States and even within America have led Jews to feel insecure and apprehensive about the motives of others, especially those who have a religious social and 7

10 political agenda. Forty-three percent of Jews rated ther importance of the separation of church and state at either 9 or 10 on a 0-10 scale in the NJDC survey; only 9 percent saw the issue as unimporant (at zero or one). Many Jews are especially sensitive to the Christian Right s belief that the renewal of the Jewish state is a prerequisite for the second coming of Jesus and that the end of times, the final conflict between good and evil, will be played out in Israel, in Armageddon (the Israeli village of Meggido). The final conflict between God and the devil will end in a fiery battle in which Jews will either convert to Christianity and join others in leaving the earth or perish in the blaze that consumes all non-believers. Neither of these choices, popularized in the series of Left Behind novels, appeal to Jews. Jews do worry about the Christian Right s social agenda. But most of all, they worry that a fundamentalist America will have no place for Jews. Many Jews see as a zero-sum fight for identity. The Christian Right fights for the introduction of prayer in schools, whereas most Jews (over two-thirds in the NJDC survey) favor a high wall of separation between church and state and say that this is an important issue. Jews see the Christian right as a threat to the religious liberty that has allowed Jews to flourish in the United States and believe that most fundamentalists are anti-semitic (Wald and Sigelman, 1997, ). In a 1996 survey conducted by Queens University, 87 percent American fundamentalists expressed the belief that it is very important to encourage non-christians to become Christians, compared to 56 percent of non-fundamentalist Christians; 65 percent disagreed that all religions are equally true, compared to 41 percent of non-fundamentalist 4 Christians. 8

11 American Jews do not need to feel personally threatened by fundamentalists. Yet they may feel less secure in their group identity and may worry that the Jewish people may be endangered, as has happened in other places at other times. As such their political identity will be shaped, at least in part, by such perceived threats to Jewish identity (Medding, 1997), much as African-American social and political identity is determined in no small part by perceived threat from the dominant white society (Blumer, 1958). Endangered minorities see themselves as more vulnerable than majorities facing threat. So a political norm of supporting the party that has historically defended the underdog in general and Jews in particular becomes a rational strategy, Another source of identity for Jews is identification with Israel. Many American Jews have seen their fate as intertwined with the security of Israel and they will view political life through the prism of which party offers greater support for the Jewish state (cf. Miller, Wlezien, and Hildreth, 1991). It should hardly be surprising that concern for Israel should be concentrated among Jewish voters: 15 percent of Jews saw positions on Israel as the most important issue in the election. Only two of 1032 non-jewish respondents to the ANES (.2 percent) rated Israel as one of the nation s most important problems. Traditionally, support for Israel has been either bipartisan or more concentrated in the Democratic party. Most Jewish elected officials are Democrats and it was a Democratic President Harry S Truman who supported the establishment of the Jewish state. Jews historically voted Democratic, though concerns about Jimmy Carter s positions on the Middle East drove his 1976 share of the Jewish vote down to 64 percent and his 1980 share to 45 percent. Many Jews viewed George H.W. Bush as tough on Israel, so the traditional loyalty to 9

12 the Democratic party was restored in 1992, when 60 percent of individual contributions to Clinton came from Jews (Friedman, 1993). Clinton and his successors Al Gore and John Kerry received between 75 and 80 percent of the Jewish vote. Gore selected Jewish Senator Joe Lieberman (D, CT) as his Vice Presidential running mate and Kerry s brother was a convert to Judaism and was active in pro-israel groups as well as in Kerry s campaign. The Democratic hold on Jewish voters for whom Israel s security is paramount came under threat in In the Democratic primaries, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean made statements that some Jewish leaders considered to be anti-israel and many Democrats in the Congress, especially very liberal Democrats in the House, had veered from the party s traditional support for Israel (Oldmixon, Rosenson, and Wald, 2005). President George W. Bush worked hard to demonstrate his commitment to Israel, in contrast to his father. And many evangelical leaders have been vocal supporters of Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians. Evangelical groups proclaim their love for Israel and the Jewish people. Pat Robertson cites the common roots of Judaism and Christianity and God s plan for Israel to be a blessing to all the peoples of the earth among the reasons why evangelicals support Israel and have an affinity 5 for Jews. American Jews have not accepted the fundamentalist expressions of support for Israel as evidence of a common interest, much less of a similarity in identity. Jews now see the Christian right as one of the greatest threats to Jewish concerns (Wald and Sigelman, 1997, 141): There is little evidence of Robertson s affinity for Jews among the Christian Right. In the 2004 ANES, the mean feeling thermometer on Jews is almost identical for evangelicals and other non-jews (mean scores of and 66.66). 10

13 Nor is there much evidence of widespread support for Israel among the Christian right. Wald and Sigelman (1997, 157) note the close alliance between Christian fundamentalists and 1996 Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, whose campaign was marked by a clear anti-israel thrust and veiled anti-semitism. Christian right members of Congress have not been loyal supporters of Israel either, often voting against the Jewish state s annual appropriation (Oldmixon, Rosenson, and Wald, 2005; Wald and Sigelman, 1997, 157). In the 2004 ANES, evangelicals do show a slightly higher feeling thermometer for Israel (62.59 compared to for other non-jews, r =.105 with evangelicalism, N = 957). While evangelicals may not be dramatically more supportive of Israel, their positions on the Middle East are distinctive because of their negative views towards Muslims. Pat Robertson warns against a fanatical religion 6 intent on returning to the feudalism of 8th Century Arabia. In the 2004 ANES, evangelicals had a mean Muslim feeling thermometer rating of compared to for other non-jews ( r =.314, N = 981 with evangelicalism). Evangelicals are less strongly committed to Israel than they are opposed to its enemies. Jews, then, are uncomfortable with the Christian Right. And they are more concerned with the threat from the Christian Right than the threat to Israel. The Jewish electorate in 2004, the NJDC survey shows, was divided between the small share (15 percent) of Jews who cited Israel as a key voting cue and the larger bloc (37 percent) who were most hostile to evangelicals: 7 55 percent of Jews who were strongly motivated by Israel voted for Kerry (compared to 83 percent of other Jews), while 86 percent of those most fearful of evangelicals cast ballots for Kerry (compared to 72 percent of other Jews). Only six percent of our Jewish sample can be 11

14 regarded as strong supporters of both Israel and evangelicals. We turn now to our analysis of vote choices for Jews and non-jews. The Jewish Vote and the Non-Jewish Vote We expect party identification, the direction of the country, and ideology to shape the behavior of both Jews and non-jews (Sigelman, 1991). Stanley and Niemi (2005) estimate that 60 percent of Jews identified with the Democratic party in 2004, about the same as in Controlling for other individual-level attributes of partisanship, being Jewish made someone 35 percent more likely to claim Democratic identification in 2004, again about the same as in Other groups in the Democratic coalition, especially white Catholics, have moved away from the Democrats: 52 percent of Catholics identified as Democrats in 1956, but just 33 percent did so in the process of a long gradual decline that began in the late 1970s. We suggest two different dynamics are at work in the persistence of Democratic voting among Jews. First, even when Jews and non-jews base their votes on the same factors, they start from different base values. The issue bases of Jewish and non-jewish ideological selfidentification are similar, but Jews are considerably more supportive of feminists, racial minorities, civil rights, abortion rights, and gay rights (Glaser, 1997; Wald, 2003, 69). Second, positions on Israel and attitudes toward evangelicals are have distinctive effects on the Jewish vote. Neither shapes the voting behavior of non-jews. Israel does not loom large in the priorities of non-jews. And, while evaluations of evangelicals clearly matter to non-jews (Bolce and DeMaio, 1999), they lose any independent effects in our analysis because they are collinear with positions on social issues. 12

15 We estimate models of vote choice in 2004 first for Jews in the NJDC survey and then for all non-jews and for non-jews excluding evangelicals in the 2004 ANES. Our models reflect the available questions in the NJDC. Question wording often differed between the two surveys, so our comparisons are approximate. But they are generally revealing and tell a story consistent with our theoretical expectations. We estimate the models of vote choice with probit analysis. We experimented with simultaneous equation estimation (two stage least squares) to control for the endogeneity of ideology and party identification. However, the instruments available in the NJDC survey were very limited and this led to models for vote choice, party identification, and ideology that were either too sparse or so similar to each other that key variables became insignificant in all of the models. In probit models, the coefficients are non-linear, so they do not have straightforward interpretations as regression coefficients do. Instead, we estimate probit effects (Rosenstone and Hansen, 1993) changes in the probability of vote choice (or vote change) as we move from the minimum to the maximum values of each predictor. For some highly skewed independent variables, we restrict the ranges of the effects to values of the independent variables at less extreme bounds (at 20% and 80% of the distributions). Our model of vote choice for American Jews includes party identification, ideology, retrospective evaluations (the direction of the country), religiosity, standard demographics (gender, income, education, and age) and positions on key issues. The NJDC survey had a thin set of questions on issues, but it did have a wide range of questions on how important likely 13

16 voters saw a range of issues in shaping vote choice. Petrocik (1996) has shown that the two parties own a range of issues, so voters who are especially concerned with Israel or terrorism should be more likely to vote Republican issues the President s party owns --while voters 8 motivated more by health care or Iraq should be more likely to cast Democratic ballots. The NJDC survey also includes questions on the importance of Iraq and the economy, and Israel. Each of the issue measures except for health is based upon a dichotomous coding of the standard questions of what are the most important and second most important issues in the campaign (combined into a single measure for each issue). Health did not rank highly enough, so we use a 10 point issue importance measure for these issues in the survey. The NJDC and ANES surveys both have questions on social issues, but they are rather different. The NJDC asked half of its sample whether they approved of gay civil unions (two- 9 thirds did). We imputed values for the other half sample. The ANES asked about approval of gay marriage (44 percent of our voting sample approved and another 3 percent accepted civil unions). The ANES had questions on when abortion should be allowed and whether gun possession should be made more difficult. The NJDC only had feeling thermometers on pro-life activists and for the National Rifle Association (both with mean scores of 20). So we need to be cautious when we compare the effects of these social issues across surveys. Israel is one of two issues that are distinctive to Jewish voters. We expect that Jews who see Israel as a central issue in the election or who are strongly pro-israel will be more likely to vote Republican. Since very few non-jews see Israel as a critical issue, we do not posit a link between issue salience and vote choice for non-jews. We include the Israel thermometer in the 14

17 equations for non-jews and we have a weak expectation that higher values on the thermometer will lead to a greater likelihood of voting Republican. Evaluations of evangelical Christians on the feeling the thermometer should be an important factor in vote choice, but primarily for Jews. For non-jews, the thermometer is for Christian fundamentalists. We realize that evangelicals (in the NJDC survey) and Christian fundamentalists are not always the same. However, we believe that there would be little difference in the results for Jews had the NJDC survey asked about Christian fundamentalists and it is hardly clear that most non-evangelical respondents would make a clear distinction either. Non-Jews might also use attitudes toward fundamentalists as a voting cue, reflecting their position in the culture war. However, we would expect that the social issues and the overall ideological identification might reduce the impact of fundamentalists to insignificance. We also expect greater likelihoods of voting Republican for our two measures of religiosity frequency of attending religious services and being a member of a religious organization. Higher income and more education should make people more likely to vote Republican; older people should also tilt toward the Republicans, while women and African- Americans (in the non-jewish models only) should be more likely to vote Democratic. We present our model of vote choice for Jews in 2004 in Table 1. The model performs very well, predicting 91 percent of the cases correctly (compared to 79.7 percent for a null model). The largest probit effects come from factors that are common to all voters: Party identification, the direction of the country (positive coefficient indicates negative evaluation of the country s direction), and the importance of health care the only variables to shift vote choice 15

18 by more than 20 percent but these are powerful effects for a sample where 80% of the sample in this estimation voted for Kerry. The next two largest effects are for variables that only shape Jewish voting behavior: the importance of Israel and for the evangelical thermometer. Controlling for other variables in the model, a Jewish voter who rates evangelicals at zero would have a probability of voting for John Kerry of.89; Jews who rate evangelicals at the maximum score (100) still are likely (.71) to vote 10 Democratic. Controlling for all of the other variables in the model, the probability of voting for Kerry does not drop below 80 percent (the mean for the sample) until the evangelical thermometer reaches 90 (and then, barely). Only 12 voters in the NJDC sample (1.7 percent) rated evangelicals so highly and barely more than 10 percent were above the neutral score of 50. Negative attitudes toward evangelicals played a central role in keeping Jewish voters in the Democratic fold. Table 1 about here Attachment to Israel, on the other hand, pushed voters to the Republican party. Respondents who said that Israel was one of the two most important issues in the election 15 percent in total were 18 percent more likely to vote for Bush. And voters who rated Israel far more highly than the Palestinians were 11 percent more likely to vote for Bush than those who had the opposite sympathies in the Middle East an effect about the same as we find for the evangelical thermometer. A Jewish voter who rated Israel as one of the two most important issues would still have a.70 probability of voting for Kerry until her evangelical thermometer 16

19 score crossed the neutral score of 50 which was true of just two percent of the NJDC sample. The impact of the importance of the Israeli issue was very powerful, but only among a handful of Jewish voters. Thirty-six percent of Jewish supporters of Bush rated Israel as one of the most important issues, compared to just 8 percent of Kerry s backers (see Table 2). The effect of attitudes toward evangelicals was just half of that for Israel s importance, but it shaped the vote choices of far more Jewish voters. Table 2 about here Positive evaluations of Israel had little effect on Jewish voters. The coefficient is positive, indicating that higher scores on the thermometer led to more support for Kerry. But this result is clearly spurious, as we can see in Table 2, where we present descriptive statistics. For the NJDC sample, the mean Israel thermometer is marginally higher for Bush than for Kerry. The simple correlation with vote choice is The overwhelming majority of Jews rated Israel highly, even if it was not a critical factor in shaping their vote choice. Jews who did not rate Israel as a voting issue still had strong feelings for the state, with a thermometer average of 77.2, compared to 95.0 for Jews who rated Israel as a key voting issue and 61.6 for all non-jews in the ANES model estimated below. It is the salience of Israel that matters for vote choice, not simply whether people have positive feelings toward the Jewish state. Voters who saw terrorism as a key issue were also more likely to vote for Bush, by almost 9 percent. This might appear to be part of a general hawkish syndrome based upon support for Israel and a concern for terrorism. But it isn t. The correlation between the importance of the 17

20 two issues is exactly zero. So there are independent effects of foreign policy concerns working to benefit the Republicans in 2004 among Jewish voters. A Jewish voter who rated both Israel and terrorism as among the top two issues and was at the mean for evangelical evaluations had a twothirds probability of voting Democratic, still substantial but considerably less than the sample average (80 percent). Such voters made up only three percent of the NJDC sample (23 voters). Only four percent rated both of these issues as critical and only 6 percent rated Israel as critical and were at or above the mean on the evangelical thermometer. There were powerful effects for foreign policy issues, especially the identity issue of Israel. However, for a much greater share of Jewish voters, the zero-sum identity issue of evangelicals loomed much larger. There is little direct impact of issue voting in our model: Neither ideology, support for gay unions, or the pro-life thermometer had significant impacts on vote choice. Approval of the National Rifle Association led to a greater likelihood of voting Republican. It would take an NRA thermometer score of 75 to bring the likelihood of voting for Kerry below 80 percent and just five percent of Jews had such high ratings for the pro-gun group. The salience of Iraq was insignficant, as were all of the demographic measures. More religious Jews were more likely to vote Republican. Attending synagogue weekly makes a person seven percent more likely to back Bush; and being a member of a Jewish organization leads to a three percent increment in voting Republican. Orthodox Jews were more likely to vote for Bush 51 percent did so. But Orthodoxy was highly correlated with the other religiosity measures and was not significant, so we excluded it from this analysis. Most issue 11 positions don t matter neither does ideology. 18

21 Jews were tempted by the right in Their key foreign policy concern Israel led many Jews to be more favorable to the GOP. So did the issue of terrorism, which about 42 percent of both Jews (in the NJDC survey) and non-jews (in the ANES) saw as a central issue in the campaign and one that benefitted the President. Yet, in the end, it was concern over evangelicals that was the central issue that kept the 2004 Democratic margin at the same level as those of the 1990s and of Vote Choice among Non-Jews American Jews vote Democratic most of the time because they identify as Democrats. Their evaluations of the state of the country are colored by their partisanship, as are other voters. Three quarters of Jews identified as Democrats and only 18 percent of Jews identified as Republicans in Eighty-two percent of Jews believed that the United States was heading in the wrong direction. It is not difficult to explain Jewish vote choice in For the most part, the factors shaping Jewish preferences for Presidential candidates look very much like those determining non-jewish vote choice. We present our model of vote choice for non-jews in Table 3 below. We estimate the same equation twice, once including evangelicals and once excluding them so that our estimate for the effect of fundamentalist sentiments does not depend upon evangelicals own views about 12 themselves. We construct our issue importance variables from the most important issue question. The ANES asked only one question on the most important problem but it did ask about the importance of other issues (such as health care). Instead of the direction of the country, as in the NJDC, the ANES has a measure of whether the country is on the right track. 19

22 Table 3 about here The estimations for all non-jews and non-evangelicals are generally very similar. The models once more are very successful, with over 90 percent of vote choices predicted correctly. The key difference between Jews and non-jews in 2004 is reflected in the null models, which are based upon modal vote choices. For Jews, prediction that all cases fall into the modal category leads to an 80 percent success rate with no predictors (the null model); for non-jews, it is 53.9 percent with evangelicals included and 53.6 with them excluded. As with Jews, the strongest effects come from party identification, whether the country is on the right track, and the importance of the health care issue. With evangelicals included, there are also significant coefficients for ideology, and gay marriage but these issues drop to insignificance when we exclude evangelicals. The culture war on gay marriage and ideology more generally is to a considerable extent driven by the issue conflicts between evangelicals and others. However, the effect of abortion is even stronger when we exclude evangelicals: People who believe that abortion should always be allowed are between 10 and 13 percent (with or without evangelicals in the data set) more likely to vote Democratic. Opposition to gun control shifts vote choice to the Republicans by about 10 percent among non-jews regardless of the sample. The religiosity variables are insignificant (due to collinearity with evaluations of fundamentalists and the social issues), as are all demographics except for education (and this becomes insignificant as well when we take evangelicals out of the sample) and race. 20

23 Some of the key factors shaping the Jewish vote are insignificant for non-jews. Neither the fundamentalist feeling thermometer nor attitudes toward Israel is significant in either model fo non-jews. There are few non-jews who rate fundamentalists at either extreme, so we calculated the effects between scores of 40 and 75, which represent respectively the 20% and 80% points in the distributions. For both non-jewish estimates, the changes in probability from ratings of 40 to 75 is only a 1 percent boost in the likelihood of voting Republican. The importance of terrorism as an issue does lead to a boost in Republican voting, but it is only 4.5 percent, half the value that we found for Jews. Jews and non-jews both respond to the typical factors of the state of the country and especially to party identification. Non-Jews seem to be motivated more by social issues, largely because they have less consensus on these issues than do Jews. While the measures on social issues are not comparable, we see a clear skew to the left on abortion, gay unions, and guns, while we see a much greater dispersion for non-jews. And the key cultural issues that matter to Jews Israel and especially evaluations of fundamentalists/evangelicals don t shape the political choices of non-jews. Issues of central concern to Jews as part of their identity don t matter when identity is not at stake. We estimated a similar model to the our overall ANES equation for evangelicals, replacing thermometer scores for fundamentalists with similar ratings for Jews. And we found no significant impact for either feeling thermometer scores for Jews or for Israel in the voting choices of evangelicals in

24 The Descriptives of Vote Choice and Vote Change Jewish and non-jewish vote choice are largely driven by the same factors. We present some simple descriptive statistics in Table 2 where we see considerable support for our argument that the dynamics of vote choice may be similar for Jews and non-jews, but that Jews start from a more liberal, pro-democratic base. Seventy-four percent of Jews identify with the Democratic party, compared to 49 percent of all non-jews and 54 percent of non-jews excluding evangelicals. Half as many Jews identify as conservatives (17.8 percent) as do non-evangelical non-jews (35.6 percent). Eighty-two percent of Jews believed that the country was on the wrong track in 2004, compared to 60.2 percent of non-evangelicals non-jews seeing the United States on the wrong track. In the second part of Table 2, we see that Kerry voters are equally liberal among all three groups (with ideology measured on a 1-3 scale, with 1 representing liberal identification and 3 conservatism). Jews who voted for Bush are somewhat more liberal (1.68) than non-jews (1.3), thus accounting for the lower zero-order correlation between ideology and vote choice for Jews (.343 compared to.796 for non-evangelical non-jews and.609 for all non-jews). We see an even more pronounced pattern for party identification: The average non-jewish Bush voter identifies as a weak Republican, while the mean Jewish Bush voter is an independent leaning Republican. The average non-jewish Kerry voter ranks between an independent Democratic leaner and a weak Democrat, while the average Jewish Democratic voter was a Democratic leaner. The simple correlations between party identification and vote choice were powerful (between.637 and.796) for Jews and non-jews alike. The high level of support for Democrat John Kerry seems explicable largely on the basis of these descriptive statistics. 22

25 The story of why identity issues played a more critical role for Jews also comes through clearly in the descriptive statistics. The evangelical thermometer for ideologically conservative Jews (mean score of 35.3) is lower than the fundamentalist thermometer for liberal nonevangelical non-jews (40.3). Jewish liberals are the most hostile to evangelicals, to be sure and the percentage gap between ideological liberals and conservatives is about 20 percent for each bloc. However, even non-evangelical non-jewish Kerry voters on average are neutral (thermometer score of 49.3) toward fundamentalists, compared to just a 19.9 percent mean for Jewish Kerry supporters and 38.0 for Jewish Bush voters. As we noted above, there is little variation in support for Israel for either Jewish or non-jewish voters. These descriptive statistics do not resolve the puzzle of why attitudes toward fundamentalists/evangelicals matter more in the Jewish vote choice equation compared to the non-jewish models. The restricted range of the thermometer scores for Jews might lead us to expect a weaker relationship between vote choice and attitudes toward evangelicals. The smaller range of variation for party identification and ideology among Jewish supporters of Bush and Kerry is reflected in the multivariate analyses above where the probit effects are generally smaller for Jews than for non-jews. The differences of about twenty percent between Bush and Kerry voters are consistent across the three samples. So why do attitudes about evangelicals matter more for Jews than for non-jews? We present some simple correlations in Table 4 that help us to resolve this issue. Table 4 about here 23

26 These correlations of the evangelical/fundamentalist thermometers with vote choice, ideology, gay unions, abortion, and gun control among Jews, all non-jews, non-evangelical non- Jews, and evangelicals speak to the nature of the culture war in American politics. Since the ANES and NJDC measures are different, we urge caution in intepretation (and we reflect the signs for all variables except vote choice for simplicity of interpretation). The simple correlation of evangelical/fundamentalist thermometers with vote choice is stronger for Jews than for nonevangelical non-jews ( r = versus -.203), but the difference is not huge. What stands out in Table 4 are two other results. First, gun control is a less consistent part of the culture war than are gay unions or abortions. Attitudes toward firearms are only weakly related to the evangelical feeling thermometers, though they are more strongly related to ideology (except among evangelicals). Second and far more critical, the simple correlations with the evangelical/fundamentalist attitudes are far more strongly correlated with ideology, gay unions, and abortion views for non-jews (and especially for evangelicals) than they are for Jews. There is a culture war syndrome among non-jews (and especially for evangelicals) reflected in the simple correlations between the evangelical/fundamentalist thermometers and ideology, gay unions, and abortion. But the correlations are far weaker for Jews. It is not simply that Jews have opted out of the culture war. The bottom part of Table 4 provides evidence that attitudes on gay unions and gun policy (the National Rifle Association thermometer) are strongly correlated with ideology (though abortion is more weakly related to liberal-conservative identification). The simple correlations between ideology and gay unions are larger for the non-jewish samples (except for evangelicals). 24

27 The larger story is that Jewish voters display a similar pattern of ideological divisions on social issues to non-jewish voters. The key exception is for the evangelical thermometers. The higher correlations between social issues and ideology with the fundamentalist thermometers depress the effect of the religious thermometer on vote choice. The lower correlations between the evangelical thermometer and measures of ideology and social policy for Jewish voters: (1) do not depress the independent effects of evaluations of evangelicals on vote choice; and (2) indicates that attitudes toward the Christian right extend well beyond policy disagreement. There is further support for our argument when we examine patterns of vote change from 2000 to 2004 using recalled vote choice in both the NJDC and ANES surveys. There are only 71 instances of vote change in the NJDC survey 40 towards the Republicans and 31 towards the Democrats in 2004, and just 60 vote changers among non-jews (and 48 among non-evangelical non-jews) in the ANES, 57 percent toward the Democrats. So multivariate analysis is hazardous at best. However, in Table 2, we examine some descriptive statistics and simple correlations for vote change. The story of vote change is rather similar to the saga of vote choice in The primary determinants of vote change for non-jews were ideology and party identification, with moderates and liberals, together with independents and Democratic leaners, returning to the Democratic fold. Neither ideology nor party identification shaped vote change for Jews. What mattered for Jews were the two identity issues. Jews who shifted from Al Gore in 2000 to Bush four years later were 14 percent more pro-israel than Jews who changed from Bush in 2000 to Kerry (the simple correlation with the Israel thermometer is -.250). Sixty two percent of the Jews who shifted to the GOP placed Israel as the first or second most important issue, compared to just 5 25

28 percent who moved from Bush to Kerry ( r = -.585). We find no similar effect for non-jews; indeed, non-jews shifting to Kerry in 2004 were marginally more pro-israel than those who changed to Bush. For both Jews and non-jews, voters switching to the Democrats were more negative toward fundamentalists than those who changed to the Republicans. The simple correlation was higher for Jews ( r = -.308) than for for all non-jews ( r = -.120) or non-evangelical non-jews ( r = -.179). The simple percentages tell an even more dramatic story. The gap in thermometer scores for Jews switching from one party to the other was 17 percent for Jews, compared to 5-6 percent for non-jews. Non-Jews who switched to Kerry had positive views of fundamentalists, with average scores of 61.2 (all non-jews) and 56.0 (non-evangelical non-jews). Jews who switched to Kerry not only had strongly negative views of evangelicals (mean rating of 15.4), but their average score was five percent less favorable to evangelicals than were Jews who voted Democratic in both 2000 and Half of all Jewish voters who switched to the Democrats rated evangelicals at zero; three quarters of switchers to Kerry rated evangelicals at 30 or less and 95 percent had a negative rating compared to only two-thirds of non-jews (see Table 2). Vote change for Jews in 2004 focused on two key issues of Jewish identity. The more religious Jews have stronger attachments to Israel (Wald and Williams, 2005) and they have become less loyal to the Democratic party. Outside the Orthodox community, Jews worry less about Israel than about the threat to their identity from evangelical Christians. This perceived threat keeps Jews in the Democratic fold and brings some who have strayed back. For those who voted Republican in 2000 or were tempted to vote for Bush in 2004, the perceived threat from the Christian Right seems to have solidified ties to the Democratic party, the traditional home for 26

29 minorities that have faced discrimination. When there is a perceived threat, there is a greater likelihood of a sense of shared fate against the out-group and a felt need to show group solidarity. The overwhelming Jewish support for John Kerry thus stands in contrast to the continuing weakness of the traditional New Deal coalition and very much in the mold of African-American loyalty to the Democratic party based upon a perception of shared fate. Reprise Why do Jews vote Democratic? Mostly for the same reasons others vote Democratic they are liberal. Jewish voters generally respond to national events in much the same way as non-jews (Sigelman, 1991). Even when Jews follow the crowd, they do it to a different beat. When other groups deserted the Democrats, the Jews have mostly remained loyal. Jews may vote for Democrats less frequently from time to time, but they usually give more support to their favored party than non-jews. Like the cat that always came back, Jews seem to boomerang back to the Democratic party. Much of this is traceable to Jews greater liberalism. Yet, there is something more than issue positions. We believe, following Medding (1977) that Jewish political loyalties depend at least in part on how secure they feel in their surroundings. When Jews feel that their identity is threatened, they turn against the parties that they perceive to be threatening. In recent years, even though Republicans have moved closer to Jews on Israel than in the past, they have not romanced the Jews as the Democrats have for many years. Many of Bill Clinton s Cabinet and close advisers were Jewish, as were both of his Supreme Court appointees. Clinton learned a few words of Hebrew ( Shalom, haver, or goodbye, friend ) to speak at the 27